A Scribe’s peep behind the Russia-led Iron Curtain

A Scribe’s peep behind the Iron Curtain

By Camil Parkhe

Pune , August 20 :

“And where the official residence of Mr. Mikhail Gorbachov?” one of the members of the Indian journalist’s delegation, visiting Moscow city, questioned the tourist guide.

The question was very simple. Neither I nor any other member of the delegation found anything odd in asking where the Russian leader lived. After all, the guide had taken us around several monuments in Moscow which were related to the first communist revolution and also shown many huge buildings which were the seats of power in Russia.

The Russian guide was visibly shaken by that question. For a moment, she was silent. But she recovered immediately and once again started speaking enthusiastically about the Red Square, Lenin’s mausoleum and the statues of the great Soviet and communist leaders.

It did not take long for us to realize why she had skillfully avoided replying to my journalist friend’s question.

The time of our visit to Russia was April 1986. Only a year had passed since Mikhail Gorbachov had taken over as the leader of the Soviet Union. Russian people and the entire world was yet to go gaga over the dynamic leader’s two pet subjects, Glasnost and Perestroika.

The Iron Curtain in the communist world was yet to be lifted. And so it was no wonder that our tourist guide thought that by talking about the official residence of the Russian leader she might have been exceeding her brief.

Even before we landed in Russia, we had heard a lot about the Iron Curtain in the communist world.

The refusal of the tourist guide to answer that simple question was a test of the life of the people in the Soviet Union who had never breathed the air of freedom for several years after the first communist revolution in the world.

After taking over the reins of administration in his country, Mr. Gorbachov had indicated the changes he planned to bring about. But having a long legacy of an iron rule behind him, it was clear that he could not bring the changes overnight.

And the Iron Curtain was not restricted to the Soviet Union alone. Most of the countries in eastern Europe had a similar way of administration like the Soviet Union.

This made amply clear to me when after the visit to Russia, I went to Bulgaria, one of the strongest ally of the Soviet Union.

Our group of Indian journalists had arrived Bulgaria to complete a course in journalism, organized by the International Organisation of Journalists. It was natural for us to compare the journalism as practiced in India and in a communist country like Bulgaria. Although the restrictions on freedom of expression were so obvious in that country, ironically, none of the journalists there dared to admit it even indirectly.

Some of the practices adopted by the print media in Bulgaria were proof of the government administration over the press. Even a slight departure from the set conventions was considered an act of the defiance against the authorities. Journalists who got away with it without the wrath of the government considered this a great achievement.

An editor of a largely-circulated weekly in Bulgaria told us that the newspapers and other periodicals in this country always used the solemn-faced photos of the Bulgarian and Russian leaders which were released through official channels. “At the time when Mr. Gorbachov had just taken Over, the official agencies initially released the photo of the Russian leader, very skillfully hiding the red patch of his balding head,” the editor told us.

Prior to the glasnost period, journalists in the Soviet Union, and other communist countries were made to believe that it was ‘unethical’ to publish photos of the national leaders which exposed their physical deformities or ‘put them in bad light’. The photos of Mr. Gorbachov showing the red patch on his head or national readers yawning, dozing off at public functions came into this category. And so, when some newspapers started publishing photos of Mr. Gorbachov without hiding the red patch, it was considered as a great step towards freedom of press.

The editor of the weekly also told us boastfully of a photo published by him in his weekly. According to him, publication of the photo had set aside all conventions hitherto faithfully observed by the media in Bulgaria. The photo was of the Bulgarian President, Theodore Zevkov, walking from the airport along with his little grandson.

“Many of my colleagues in the profession were taken aback when the photo was published. And I was not pulled up by the government administration either,” The editor told us without hiding his pride in breaking the old tradition.

The editor’s concept of setting a new precedent in the history of his country’s journalism shocked us. But it was also an indication of the people in the communist world slowly questioning the logic behind many conventions.

During my long stay in Bulgaria, I witnessed many functions which were attended by Bulgarian ministers and communist party functionaries. Despite our discreet probing, the local people rarely uttered a word against the autocratic communist regime. There were almost no visible signs of unrest brewing in the minds of the people against the totalitarian rule.

At that time, little did we realize that the tiny nation of Bulgaria, too, would experience a glasnost, ending the nearly two-decade-old regime of its president. The man responsible for this, like the events in other communist nations, was, of course, Mikhail Gorbachov.